Savannah Breeze (29 page)

BOOM thumpa-thumpa-thump.
BOOM thumpa-thumpa-thump.
The heavy bass beat rattled the front door of the Binnacle.

“Place is jumping,” Harry said, standing aside to let me enter.

“Holy crap,” I said, squeezing inside the entryway and pulling him in behind me.

The Binnacle was an entirely different scene tonight. What had been a high-ceilinged, light-flooded restaurant on Friday afternoon was now a pitch-black, cavelike nightclub pulsating with loud music and an even louder audience.

We could see a spotlit deejay on a raised platform in front of the wall of windows, and directly in front of him, a sea of bobbing heads, which must have been the dance floor. But other than that, the room was so mobbed, little else was distinguishable.

As we inched forward we came to the maître d's stand, which was now manned by a muscle-bound Cuban guy in a tight-fitting red silk T-shirt.

“Ten-dollar cover charge,” he announced in a bored voice.

“Ten dollars? To listen to canned music from a deejay?” It was my voice but my grandfather's influence.

He held up a roll of red cardboard movie tickets. “You get a free drink ticket with the cover. You staying or going?”

“Staying,” Harry said, handing over a twenty-dollar bill.

The doorman ripped two tickets from his roll and gave them to
Harry, who guided me forward with a firm hand placed in the small of my back.

“How are we gonna do this?” I asked, shouting in Harry's ear in order to make myself heard. “There must be three hundred people in here. It's a zoo.”

His eyes were already searching the room, no doubt for the missing Emma.

“We split up,” he said. “I'll take the right side, you take the left. Meet me back at the door in, what, an hour?”

I looked at the cheap plastic watch I'd bought at a drugstore earlier in the day.

“Ten-thirty,” I agreed. “And don't let me catch you flirting with any chicks unless they have big boobs and green eyes.”

“It's a deal,” he said, laughing and melting into the crowd.

It took me fifteen minutes to snake my way over toward the bar, during which time I had my already aching toes stomped on half a dozen times, and my butt groped at least twice. By the time I reached the bar, I was ready to concede that my mission was impossible. Every woman in the room seemed to have short dark hair and big boobs.

Ten minutes after I'd claimed a hard-fought spot at the bar, a bartender finally materialized in front of me. He was pencil thin, with shoulder-length pale blond hair, an even paler mustache, and a ruffled pink tuxedo shirt.

I handed over my red ticket with a sigh of relief. “Maker's Mark and water.”

“Sorry. You only get well drinks with this,” he said. “Jim Beam?”

“Okay,” I said wearily.

He brought the drink and set it down in front of me.

“Is it always this crazy here at night?” I asked.

“Saturday nights are pretty wild,” he agreed. “We get a ton of tourists, plus the regulars. Is this your first time?”

“My first Saturday night,” I told him. “I'm looking for a girl who supposedly hangs out here a lot. She's the chef on a yacht? Her name's Emma?”

He shook his head. “Sorry. I've only been working here a couple of weeks. I don't really know any of the regulars' names yet.”

I sighed again. “Short dark hair. Green eyes. Big boobs, long legs?”

“Don't know her, but I'd like to.”

“Yeah, you and every other guy in town.” With deep reluctance, I put a five-dollar bill on the bar. “How about any of the other bartenders?”

The bill disappeared in a flash. “What was the name again?”

“Emma Murphey. She crews on the
Reefer Madness,
tied up over at Bahia Mar.”

Five minutes later, my drink was gone, and so, apparently, was my new friend. I knew I needed to keep looking, but the Elton John shoes had my feet screaming, and by now my shortened bra straps had dug deep tunnels into my protesting flesh.

With my back to the bar, I gazed out at the crowd. Every head in the room was bobbing to the same tune, “Brick House,” by The Commodores.

Shake it down, shake it down, shake it down, now, the music urged. Good godamighty, my head was bobbing too.

“You're looking for Emma?”

I whirled around. Blond-boy bartender was back, accompanied by a really tall also blond person of questionable gender, also wearing a ruffled pink tux shirt.

“This is Joy,” my new friend said.

“Really?” I said.

“Save the jokes,” Joy said. “I've heard 'em all.” Her voice was surprisingly high, given her boyish good looks. “What do you want with Emma?”

Think fast, I told myself. Think really fast. I decided to go with the partial truth.

“I own a restaurant, and I heard she's a pretty decent chef,” I said.

“Who told you that?” Joy asked.

“Somebody in the Grille, over at Bahia Mar,” I said. “I didn't get their name, but they said if I was looking for kitchen help, I should maybe talk to Emma Murphey.”

“Emma hasn't come in tonight,” Joy said. “But I heard she might be in the market for a new job. That asshole she works for has been jerking her around pretty bad.”

“You mean Meat Loaf?” I asked.

Joy frowned. “Who's Meat Loaf? Emma said the guy's name is Doobie.”

Ah, the young, I thought. So innocent. So clueless. Joy, I sadly thought, probably didn't even know all the lyrics to “Brick House,” let alone “I'd Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That).”

“Do you know how I can get in touch with Emma?” I asked.

“I'm not her agent or anything,” Joy said, looking annoyed. “She might be at Dirty Dan's, over on A1A. It's in a strip shopping center with a Publix and a Blockbuster.”

“Thanks.” I shook Joy's hand. She held it out, palm up. Expectant.

“Right,” I said, extracting another precious five-dollar bill from the pocket of the capris, and shaking her hand again. The bill disappeared. Another hospitality professional.

“Only five? Are you kidding?” Joy said, insulted.

“Five,” I said firmly. “It's not like you're her agent or anything.”

In the car on the way to Dirty Dan's, I filled Harry in on what I'd learned, which, admittedly, wasn't much.

“Emma's boss's name is Doobie,” I said. “And she's been telling people he's been jerking her around lately.”

“I found a girl who knows this guy Liam,” Harry said. “She thinks Liam moonlights at a Radio Shack somewhere here in town.”

“Did she know which one?” I asked. “In a town this big, there could be half a dozen or more Radio Shacks.”

“Nope,” Harry said. “Just that he's a big gadget freak. He doesn't hang out at the bars. She says she met him at the Starbucks closest to Bahia Mar.”

“A Starbucks addict,” I said. “That's excellent. Once you get hooked on that stuff, nothing else will do. We can check that out in the morning. And hope he hasn't decided to buy a bag of the stuff and brew it himself back on the boat.”

Five-bucks' worth of information from Joy hadn't included exact directions to Dirty Dan's. We drove up and down A1A for nearly an hour, until we found a shopping center with both a Publix supermarket and a Blockbuster and Dirty Dan's.

The bar was just a narrow little neighborhood place that smelled like stale beer and burnt popcorn. You had to pass a double row of video games at the front of the room to get to the bar. We spotted Emma right off. A young girl with short dark hair, she wore a minuscule pair of gym shorts rolled down to her pelvic bones, and a skintight white spaghetti-strap top that did indeed reveal all of Emma's publicized blessings. She was scowling down at a Golden Tee golf game.

“Shit!” she said, pounding the top of the game.

“Emma?”

“Oops. Sorry,” she said. “Were you waiting to play?”

“No. Actually, I was hoping to talk to you,” I said.

“Yeah, sure. Are you the lady who's looking for a chef for a restaurant?”

“How'd you know?”

She laughed. “Joy called me on my cell phone. What kind of restaurant are we talking about here? 'Cause if you're thinking about bar food, I won't waste your time.”

“No—” I started to say.

“Look,” Emma said, resting her elbows on the top of the game. “I
may not have a diploma from Johnson and Wales or anyplace like that, but I can freakin' cook. You want French? Pacific Rim? Afro-Caribbean? I can do it. But I am not taking a job as another line cook or a prep girl, or any other crap like that.”

She took a deep breath. “Well?”

“Let's talk,” I said. I gestured to Harry. “This is my friend Harry. Can we chat?”

“Absolutely,” Emma said. We followed her to the far end of the bar. Harry sat on one side of her and I sat at the other.

“Hey, Alton,” she called to the bartender, a wizened man with a graying military-style crew cut. “Let me have a Speckled Brown Hen.”

“Is that another kind of martini?” I asked.

Emma laughed. “It's a microbrew. I'm not really into hard liquor.”

“I'll have the same,” Harry called.

“Me too,” I said.

Alton brought the beers and a bowl of bar nuts, gave us a nod, and faded away.

“So,” Emma said. “What's the deal?”

“Why don't you tell me a little bit about your current cooking job?” I asked.

She ran her fingers through her hair, leaving it standing up straight. On her it was cute.

“Don't get me wrong. I love Doobie, I really do. When he's straight, man, he is just the best. Wicked funny and sweet. And he loves good food. Or, he used to, anyway. He was willing to try anything. We'd get into port on some little island you never heard of, and I'd go ashore and buy fresh fish, fruit, whatever was local. And he was game to try all of it. ‘Surprise me,' he'd say, and just hand me a wad of money to go shopping. It was a dream job, you know?”

“Was? It's not anymore?” Harry asked.

She shrugged. “It's not Doobie, it's his old lady.”

“Who is Doobie?” I asked finally.

“Doobie. You know, Doobie Bauers.”

“Actually, I don't know him,” I said.

“Yeah, I forget people know about the band, and Meat Loaf. Most people, unless they're really hard-core Meat Heads, they never heard of Doobie. But see, Doobie was there in the very beginning.”

“So, he
is
a member of Meat Loaf?” Harry asked.

“
Was
. He was with them until, like, the third album, maybe? And then, when Meat disbanded the group to go into rehab, Doobie did a lot of session work. He wrote some big hits for other bands, toured with Def Leppard, even. But mostly he's famous for being in Meat Loaf.”

“That's nice,” I said. “But we saw the yacht,
Reefer Madness
. It must be worth a lot of money. Can an ex-musician really afford something like that?”

“Are you kidding?” Emma asked. “Hell, yeah, he can afford it. You ought to see his ranch, or whatever you call it, in Nashville. One thing about Doobie, even when he was totally messed up on drugs, he was smart about business. A bunch of his songs have been on movie sound tracks. Have you seen the new Toyota Avalon television commercial? That's Doobie's song playing in the background.”

“Wow,” I said, impressed. “But you said things have gone sour with your job?”

Emma took a swig of beer, then daintily wiped her mouth on a napkin. “Yeah, it really bites. I'm not supposed to know about it, or say anything yet, but Anya is making Doobie sell
Reefer Madness
. So I'm gonna be out of a job pretty soon now.”

“Who is Anya, and why is she making him sell the yacht?” I asked.

“She's his old lady,” Emma said. “What a bitch! If she'd just mellow out and leave him alone, everything would be cool. Look,” she said sadly, “Doobie is in the music business. It's not a secret. He's had, what do they call it?” She made little quote marks with her fingers. “Substance-abuse issues.

“I mean, Doobie is old school rock and roll. There's a lot of pres
sure in the business. A lot of money on the line every time he goes into the studio. Doobie can't relax until he smokes some weed, or maybe snorts a line of coke. So he flies down here, we take the
Reefer
out, he drinks some Cristal, and he gets a little high. Who gets hurt?”

“Anya doesn't like that, I take it?” Harry asked.

“It makes her totally nuts,” Emma said. “She won't even let him come down here without her anymore, and when they do come, she has a personal assistant go all over the boat, trying to find his stash, and trying to get everybody to narc out on Doobie.”

Emma giggled. “The last time they were down, it was freakin' hilarious. Anya's running all over the place, ordering everybody around. I mean, she had me making macrobiotic meals for him. Brown rice and steamed veggies! And every time she's not looking, Doob is dipping into his secret stash and getting wasted. When we got back into Bahia Mar that last time, she was so pissed she couldn't even see straight. They had a huge fight. God, what a bitch! That's when she told Doobie, ‘Either get rid of the boat, and get straight for good, or I'm outta here.'”

Emma took another sip of beer. “Personally? I think he should keep the boat and kick her bony ass out on the street. But I don't get a vote.”

Harry and I looked over at each other and exchanged a tiny, secret smile.

But Emma wasn't stupid. She caught the looks.

“Hey. What's going on here? Why are you so interested in Doobie? Oh, man, you never really intended to give me a chef's job, did you?”

She'd been straight with me, so I decided to be straight with her.